Enhancing Documents with Multidimensional Relevance Statements in Cross-encoder Re-ranking

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to consider multiple dimensions of relevance beyond topicality in cross-encoder re-ranking. On the one hand, current multidimensional retrieval models often use na\"ive solutions at the re-ranking stage to aggregate multiple relevance scores into an overall one. On the other hand, cross-encoder re-rankers are effective in considering topicality but are not designed to straightforwardly account for other relevance dimensions. To overcome these issues, we envisage enhancing the candidate documents -- which are retrieved by a first-stage lexical retrieval model -- with "relevance statements" related to additional dimensions of relevance and then performing a re-ranking on them with cross-encoders. In particular, here we consider an additional relevance dimension beyond topicality, which is credibility. We test the effectiveness of our solution in the context of the Consumer Health Search task, considering publicly available datasets. Our results show that the proposed approach statistically outperforms both aggregation-based and cross-encoder re-rankers.

Responsible AI in Healthcare

This article discusses open problems, implemented solutions, and future research in the area of responsible AI in healthcare. In particular, we illustrate two main research themes related to the work of two laboratories within the Department of Informatics, Systems, and Communication at the University of Milano-Bicocca. The problems addressed concern, in particular, {uncertainty in medical data and machine advice}, and the problem of online health information disorder.

Feature Analysis for Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Articles through Supervised Classification

Nowadays, thanks to Web 2.0 technologies, people have the possibility to generate and spread contents on different social media in a very easy way. In this context, the evaluation of the quality of the information that is available online is becoming more and more a crucial issue. In fact, a constant flow of contents is generated every day by often unknown sources, which are not certified by traditional authoritative entities. This requires the development of appropriate methodologies that can evaluate in a systematic way these contents, based on `objective' aspects connected with them. This would help individuals, who nowadays tend to increasingly form their opinions based on what they read online and on social media, to come into contact with information that is actually useful and verified. Wikipedia is nowadays one of the biggest online resources on which users rely as a source of information. The amount of collaboratively generated content that is sent to the online encyclopedia every day can let to the possible creation of low-quality articles (and, consequently, misinformation) if not properly monitored and revised. For this reason, in this paper, the problem of automatically assessing the quality of Wikipedia articles is considered. In particular, the focus is on the analysis of hand-crafted features that can be employed by supervised machine learning techniques to perform the classification of Wikipedia articles on qualitative bases. With respect to prior literature, a wider set of characteristics connected to Wikipedia articles are taken into account and illustrated in detail. Evaluations are performed by considering a labeled dataset provided in a prior work, and different supervised machine learning algorithms, which produced encouraging results with respect to the considered features.